Black Brush Issue

[johannfromchina]

I have a weird issue:  By paint brush is always black, no matter what colour I set.  I check all setting but cannot find anything that has resulted in this.  What typing text is till uses the foreground colour, or even the pixel tool uses the foreground colour, but as soon as I change to a normal brows, it is just black.  Even if I select what as a colour it paints in black.

Please any ideas to fix this will be appreciated!

 

[Dan C]

Hi johannfromchina,

Welcome to the forums

There may be a few reasons for this, firstly you may be painting in a Mask layer that can only accept Alpha values, so your brush will only paint in black. Secondly your document may be in the Greyscale colour format, which would convert any colour on screen to a various shade of black/grey.

Could you please provide a screenshot including your layers studio, and one of your colour setup for the document?

Many thanks in advance!

[johannfromchina]

I tested the issue by also just creating a new document and add a single layer without any mask.  The document format is not grey-scale as the pen tool still paint in colour, it is only the brush that draws in black.  I am really at a point to abandon Affinity Photo as I am currently not be able to use it.  I have used it for many months and this issue only appear after upgrading version 1.8.  Is there a way to downgrade back to the previous version, maybe that will solve the issue.  (The 1.8 Wacom tablet issue is also driving me crazy - I enabled Windows ink as suggested to get pen presure to work, but then many things went mad - I cannot move my view by pressing the space bar and drag with the mouse, some layer adding functionality went haywire.  After disabling the Windows ink agian, those things behaved normal again - but without pen pressure functionality).

[Dan C]

Thanks for your screenshot and further information provided, it's possible it's the brush in use here, as I can see colour is working with other tools/brushes.

I'm very sorry to hear you feel this way regarding update 1.8 - there is a possibility of rolling back to a previous version, but before you try that I'd like to reset the app back to default settings.

You can reset your app back to its default settings by holding down the CTRL key while launching the app. When the Clear User Data window appears, click Select All and then Clear. The app will now open.

Be aware that resetting your app back to its default settings will lose any custom settings such as keyboard shortcuts and brushes etc. To backup such settings before resetting the app, please watch our Affinity: Exporting User Settings and Keyboard Shortcuts video. - https://player.vimeo.com/video/189596577/

[johannfromchina]

8 hours ago, Dan C said:

Thanks for your screenshot and further information provided, it's possible it's the brush in use here, as I can see colour is working with other tools/brushes.

I'm very sorry to hear you feel this way regarding update 1.8 - there is a possibility of rolling back to a previous version, but before you try that I'd like to reset the app back to default settings.

You can reset your app back to its default settings by holding down the CTRL key while launching the app. When the Clear User Data window appears, click Select All and then Clear. The app will now open.

Be aware that resetting your app back to its default settings will lose any custom settings such as keyboard shortcuts and brushes etc. To backup such settings before resetting the app, please watch our Affinity: Exporting User Settings and Keyboard Shortcuts video. - https://player.vimeo.com/video/189596577/

Thanks Dan C, I have reset Affinity Photo and it seems to solve the problem.  I still do not know what I did wrong, so it will most likely happen again. 

But I am glad I can start using it again!  I have also now upgraded to verion 1.8.2

After resetting it, I fiddled around to make sure it works correctly, but then I noticed some other problem - or let me rather say unexpected behaviour.  I have been using it since July last year and cannot remember that this was always the behaviour. 

Please Note, my main reason for using Affinity photo is for photo editing, so my main usage of the paint brush is to paint on a mask.  So this is most likely what the following is just odd to me because I cannot remember when last I used to paint on a canvas with a paint brush.

While testing I created a new document and created two layers, the one I filled with a light green and the other with a yellow.  Before I did this I assigned the foreground and back ground colours with these two colours. 

I then added a mask to the top layer, and for a test I wanted to hide part of the top layer so that the green of the bottom layer becomes visible.  I was expecting that as soon as I click on the mask, the foreground and background colours will change to black and white, but this did not happen.  It basically gave me the grayscale version of the light green and light yellow - which in grayscale is a very light grey with no effect when I paint on the mask.  I then changed the foreground colour to black to paint on the mask.  Then when I click back on the layer itself, I was hoping the foreground colour will change back to the paint colours I was busy using, but instead it kept the black colour.  Note that it does change the mode from RGB to grayscale when selecting the canvas or the mask.

Is this normal behaviour?  Was it alsways like this?  How do people switch between colours and black and white when alternating between painting on a canves and painting on a mask?

 

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, johannfromchina said:

Is this normal behaviour?  Was it alsways like this?

I think it may be the 'new' normal & perhaps an unfortunate consequence of what some of the 1.8.x release notes describe as a 'fix'

• Switching to a mask node will now automatically switch to the grey colour slider.

I am not sure what "node" means in this context but whenever I select a mask layer & touch the slider, the frontmost color selector in the Colors panel immediately switches to grey & does not return to the previous RGB (or whatever) color I previously had there when I selected the mask's parent or any other layer.

Intended fix or not, I think it would be better if the mask greyscale 'color' applied only to mask layers (& there was just a single color selector in the Colors panel when a mask layer was selected) so that clicking on the parent or any other non-mask layer returned to the previous primary/secondary or stroke/fill colors.

I would also like to see the same thing for painting on the built-in masks of adjustment & live filter layers -- if we are actually really only affecting a layer's alpha transparency, then it isn't really a color to begin with & therefore should not have any effect on the current primary/secondary or stroke/fill colors.

Does that make sense?

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Does that make sense?

@stokerg (or any staff member), can you check on this?

[johannfromchina]

On 3/20/2020 at 7:50 AM, R C-R said:

@stokerg (or any staff member), can you check on this?

@R C-R, I downgraded to version 1.7.3 to check.  The foreground/background colours stay the same as in 1.8.2.  The only difference is that the RGB change to Grayscale when you select the mask in 1.8.2 but not in 1.7.3.  But the actualy behaviour is the same.  With version 1.7.3, even with RGB selected, when painting on the masek, it paints in the grayscale version of the selected colour.  So in my previous example, if my foreground colour is yellow, it will paint in a light gray on the mask in both 1.7.3 and 1.8.2.  So the only change they made in 1.8.2 is an indication that you are not going to paint in colour when a mask is selected.  

I most likely remembered my Photoshop behaviour, where the foreground/background colours is seperactedly selected for masks and canvases.  Affinity Photo does not have this behaviour and did not have it in a previous version.

 

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, johannfromchina said:

So in my previous example, if my foreground colour is yellow, it will paint in a light gray on the mask in both 1.7.3 and 1.8.2. 

In 1.7.3, when you select some other layer after painting on a mask layer, does the foreground color selector switch to the gray color or remain yellow?

[Dan C]

On 3/19/2020 at 9:04 PM, R C-R said:

Does that make sense?

I agree that this is the new intended behaviour, however I can certainly see room for improvement with a separate Colour option when you have a mask/adjustment layer selected - so I'll log this as an improvement with our devs now

Let me know if I've misinterpreted anything here!

[johannfromchina]

5 hours ago, Dan C said:

I agree that this is the new intended behaviour, however I can certainly see room for improvement with a separate Colour option when you have a mask/adjustment layer selected - so I'll log this as an improvement with our devs now

Let me know if I've misinterpreted anything here!

Thanks, this will be  a great enhancment!